Thoughts for November 6, 2022
Good afternoon. This week’s topics include conspiracy theories, helium-3, gas cooking, and air purification.
Conspiracy Theories
What are we to make of conspiratorial thinking? Conspiracy theory has been a part of culture since the invention of language, I would imagine. In American history, to pick among any number of examples, John Flynn of the isolationist America First Committee alleged that the Roosevelt administration had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And of course the conspiracy theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy are too numerous to mention. Richard Hofstadter tackled the phenomenon well in his 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
But there have been several watersheds that I think make today’s crop of conspiratorial thinking qualitatively different from that of the past. First, in the 1970s, two events brought greater plausibility to the idea that vast conspiracies could operate in American society. First, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972, it came to light that the Nixon administration, under the direction of the President himself, had engaged in efforts to cover up their role in the burglary. This, and a whole range of crimes which came to be collectively referred to as the Watergate scandal, forced Nixon to resign in 1974.
Earlier, the press had generally been deferential to the government, especially on military matters. Walter Cronkite’s closing editorial from his Report in Vietnam in 1968 is a rare exception and is credited as having played a significant role in turning public opinion against the war. Following Watergate, journalism moved to a more adversarial stance, as journalists aspired to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, working to root out corruption not just in government, but in corporations, in medicine, in academia, and in all facets of life. Adam Curtis explains what happened in this short video.
Then the following year, the Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church, uncovered numerous unethical activities on the part of the U.S. intelligence community. The most notorious of them was Project MKUltra, an illegal effort to use drugs and psychological torture to brainwash and coerce confessions in interrogations. Other revelations included COINTELPRO, an campaign of surveillance against allegedly subversive organizations such as civil rights groups; Family Jewels, a campaign to assassinate foreign leaders; Operations Mockingbird, a covert domestic propaganda campaign; and others. The committee led to the understanding that covert forces in the U.S. government could in fact be engaged in sinister, hidden behavior.
The second watershed was the Truther movement. With the possible exception of the Kennedy assassination, I don’t think any event in American history has more been the subject of conspiracy theory than the September 11 attacks. For the most part, mainstream media did not touch the issue, even to debunk it. Popular Mechanics was an exception, which in 2005 published “9/11: Debunking the Myths” and followup coverage. James Meigs, editor at Popular Mechanics at the time, also wrote a retrospective for City Journal.
PM’s coverage focused on verifiable claims that fall within PM’s wheelhouse of science and technology. For example, it is generally understood that the collapse of the World Trade Center was caused by a combination of the shock of the plane crashes on structural support steel, as well as weakening caused by fire. Truthers claimed that since jet fuel burns at a lower temperature than that at which steel melts, this story is wrong. PM’s investigation showed nevertheless that at the temperature at which jet fuel burns (1100° C), steel loses half of its strength. Another truther claim is that the impact shape at the Pentagon does not match an airplane and therefore must have been a missile; PM demonstrated why this claim is wrong. (Incidentally, a friend of my business partner lived very close to the Pentagon and witnessed the crash; for her testimony she was harassed by truthers.)
I would consider the third watershed to be the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis led to an extended period of high unemployment and slow growth. Out of it emerged two populist movements: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which have done much to set the tone of politics since then. For these movements, politics is combat between movements representing “the people” and those representing shadowy, nefarious interests: bankers, corporations, bought-off politicians, and so forth. The influence on later populist movements is very visible. These movements move beyond belief in discrete conspiracy theories into a mindset of conspiracism: a manner of thinking in which conspiratorial behavior is the norm and the proper way to understand the world.
As both Hofstadter and Meigs, and many others, have pointed out, an underappreciated attraction of conspiracy theory is that is gives adherents the framework to think of themselves as on the avant-garde of society, seeing things that the “sheeple” (a 9/11 truther term) are unable to see. One sees the same impulse in the self-styling as “woke” or “based”, or slogans such as “do your own research”.
As even a highly selective review should demonstrate, not everything that can be called a conspiracy theory is a form of pathological thinking, nor are all forms of pathological thinking conspiracy theories. When we try to articulate why something such as 9/11 trutherism is bad thinking, “conspiracy theory” seems to miss the mark somewhat.
Helium-3
As briefly mentioned a few weeks ago, there are presently some uses for helium-3 aside from hypothetical uses in fusion reactors, and there have been concerns about supply. What is the present status?
In 2010, the Congressional Research Service produced a useful report. Most helium-3 to that time came from the decay of tritium, which in turn came from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Until 2001, supplies of helium-3 were not a major concern. But following the September 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security embarked on a program to use He3 as a neutron detector to catch radioactive material that might come in through ports. Most He3 came to be used for this purpose, putting supplies under strain.
Helium 3 is also used for medical imaging in the lungs, which are sensitive and thus call for nonradioactive imaging techniques; for oil and gas exploration; and for scientific research applications.
There are typically two things that can happen when there is a threat of a shortage of a mineral. First, it can be used more efficiently. Recycling can reduce He3 needs. Alternatives can be used; for example, DHS developed a neutron detector using the more abundant boron-10 isotope to replace He3. These measures have mitigated the shortage. The second option is to increase supply, which can come from heavy water nuclear reactors, natural gas production, particle accelerators, and from the ambient atmosphere, though it is unlikely that the latter two could be economically feasible. The CRS report doesn’t even mention harvesting from the moon.
Helium-3 (with two protons and one neutron) is one isotope of helium; helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons) is much more common and comprises most helium used industrially. That isotope has also faced periodic supply crunches, including at present, though for very different reasons.
Gas Cooking
Natural gas hookups for applications such as heating and cooking have been of concern from a climate change perspective. Even if the electricity itself is sourced from natural gas, it is evidently better from a greenhouse gas emission standpoint to use electric cooking because the energy efficiency of electric cooking outweighs the penalty at the power plant. What about other kinds of pollutants?
Rocky Mountain Institute did a study a couple years ago attempting to answer that for nitrous oxide. They showed that peak NO2 emissions from gas cooking can exceed 1 hour WHO guidelines for indoor NO2 exposure (though the comparison, peak emissions vs. 1 hour guidelines, is not quite valid).
Electric cooking tends to be more expensive, which is why the switch does not happen in an entirely market-driven manner. The American Gas Association did a study last year and found that the cost of carbon mitigation by policy-driven electric cooking is $572-806 per ton, well in excess of most estimates of the social cost of carbon as well as many other mitigation measures. I haven’t yet seen a good monetization on other pollutants.
Maybe there is a good case for forbidding gas hookups in new construction. But more work is needed to make that case. In the meantime, it is probably best to focus on mitigation measures that are known to be effective.
Air Purification
Most efforts at cleaning urban air pollution revolve around source reduction. But there are approaches for removal of pollution in the atmosphere as well. There are three main ways to do so: photocatalysts such as titanium dioxide, air purifiers (or smog towers), and biological methods such as living walls.
Titanium dioxide can be coated on buildings. It is useful for removing nitrous oxide and volatile organic compounds from the atmosphere, but it doesn’t work on carbon monoxide. A study done a few years ago by the California Energy Commission didn’t find it to be a cost-effective solution.
Smog towers are not used very widely and are fairly new; here’s an example from India. Most of the academic work on them I have seen has been fairly negative. This paper is an example. Maybe the conclusion is right, but I don’t think the paper makes a good argument.
As for biological approaches, there are some examples like Bosco Verticale in Milan. Here’s a bit on living walls. And of course there are old fashioned approaches like tree planting. Some studies like this one give good cost/benefit ratios for tree planting. Otherwise, I’m not sure how to evaluate these kinds of biological approaches.
We are continuing to find that air pollution has serious negative effects on health and cognition, and so keeping city air clean continues to be a high priority. Reduction of air pollution, such as by phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles, will probably do most of the work. But I think there is an important role for active removal as well.